Feline Laryngologist

Larger headpiece recommended.

Those among you who are regular readers will recall that while I easily communicate canines, I find them simple and the most ill-mannered of four-legged animals. (Yes, even more uncouth than goats, with whom I feel a certain affinity of spirit despite their voraciously destructive tendencies and the clear mark of evil upon their square, square eyes.) And you may remember my trauma in losing my dearest Office Abbie to the mean streets outside my laser tag office, so when an amber-eyed tortoiseshell plaintively meowed up at me after I married that Carey Dunderwould off to some meaty-faced hockey player, and I watched the couple galloping their horses off into the smog, I found my efforts at understanding the imploring cat to be in vain. Staring into the urine-colored pools of its eyes, I knew that it was just as frustrated as I. It was confirmed when she promptly tripped me as I attempted to stride away. Unfortunately, I took a rather hard tumble onto the cat, and left her jerking, mouth frothing, in the arms of a young boy in a jaunty, striped sailor shirt and so never learned the secret message she meant to impart.

But I did leave the park that day with a determination I hadn’t felt since I learned that Oxycodone was to be removed from production.

One thing I can tell all you would-be veterinarians– there is truly no need for costly years of medical training. In fact, most animals look just like humans on the inside, so a copy of Gray’s Anatomy, a scalpel-like instrument and a good mix of pain pills (which, unfortunately, contains Oxycodone with less and less frequency these days) are all you really need to perform what may, on the outset, seem like entirely too complicated procedures. And if you’re looking to do something “specialized,” then you only really need to read the part of the book that’s about the particular body part you want to work on. Even then, it’s not entirely useful. How am I supposed to know what a flagellum is? A flappy tail, that I understand. No need for a fancy word. What I’m driving at, vets, is that when it comes down to the nuts and bolts, all you really need is that picture. I recommend ripping it gently out and laminating it.

At this point, you are probably asking out loud, “Why, if Cyrus St. Rid, DVM, has managed to perform thousands of cat laryngological operations, do we still have such a dearth of talking cats?” I tell you, readers, there is a tragic tale at the heart of this career. For I fast learned that the lifespan of a talking cat turns out to be shortened by roughly the rest of its life minus 12 minutes, so even though I consider the procedure to be a success, it does not turn out to be entirely useful, since mostly the cats just say, “Oh god, don’t go for the ones with the talons!” or, “I feel like I swallowed an entire box of litter,” before they expire. And believe me, as much as you think you want to hear one say that, Mr. Polly assures me that it is very depressing.